If one’s research is in a hole as deep as evolutionary psychology is when accounting for compassion, why not stop digging?:
Last Sunday, I pointed to a chapter I wrote in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021) on evolutionary psychology, best understood as the psychology we have derived from our not-quite-human ancestors.
“Not-quite-human ancestors”? Well, if you believe in conventional evolution theory at all, you must suppose that we have not-quite-human ancestors. Thus, to understand the origin of traits like giving to the Heart & Stroke Fund or subscribing to popular science magazines, we must get back to a point before any such institutions could have existed but there was some sort of dim potential. But we can’t really do that because, as noted last Sunday, there is no such thing as a fossil mind.
Early human minds, from what we can glean of them from ancient culture, don’t count. If we thawed out a Neanderthal from the permafrost from 50,000 years ago and managed to communicate with him, what might happen?
Here’s one possibility: He turns out to love football, beer, and french fries. He really, really wants a deer rifle. He is an awesome companion in a deer blind — very quiet and a good shot. Then, one day, sitting for hours overnight in a snowstorm back at the camp, he starts to tell us about his religion… and how he wishes his now forever-lost woman had understood him better…
Have we really got to the bottom of human psychology? Hardly. He could have been born in Ontario, Canada, in 1964 and stepped out of a deer blind somewhere near Peterborough.
And to the extent that we can interpret early human artifacts and symbols at all, they are human artifacts and symbols.
All extant humans have human psychologies. So how are we to gain hard evidence for a not-quite-human psychology that would help us understand the evolution of basic traits? That’s what naturalists would need to explain traits like compassion and religion in wholly evolutionary terms.
Denyse O’Leary, “Compassion and religion: Darwin’s unscratchable itches” at Mind Matters News
Takehome: Stop digging? The hole evolutionary psychologists are digging IS the enterprise. Any motive that didn’t merely spread selfish genes would be invisible to them.
You may also wish to read: There is no such thing as a fossil mind. A chapter on evolutionary psychology in Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith (2021) looks at the curious discipline of evolutionary psychology. If our behavior is said to stem from our prehuman past, not from our present circumstances, evolutionary psychology is a discipline without a subject.
Although evolutionary psychologists may tell themselves endless ‘just-so stories’ about how the human mind, or about how any particular trait of the human mind and/or human behavior, may have randomly evolved, evolutionists in general, and evolutionary psychologists in particular, in their denial that we have free will in a real and meaningful sense, have, in reality, undermined any claim whatsoever that they are making, or that they are capable of making, rationally coherent arguments in the first place.
In short, in their denial of free will, evolutionists in general, and evolutionary psychologists in particular, have undermined rationality altogether, and since all science, philosophy, and even psychology itself, are all grounded on our ability to make rational inferences, then evolutionists in general, and evolutionary psychologists in particular, have undermined any claim that they have anything meaningful to say about science, philosophy, and even psychology itself.
Moreover, besides their denial of free will, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, and thus with their implicit denial of the immaterial realm altogether, simply leave everything that is truly important about what it really means to be human on the cutting room floor.
As Adam Sedgwick scolded Charles Darwin himself, “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.”
Everything that is truly important, and that can be said to ‘radically’ differentiate us from all the other creatures on earth, and that truly makes us human and not animals, is immaterial in its foundational essence and character, and therefore it is simply impossible for Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, to ever give an adequate account for how humans came about.
As Dr. Michael Egnor explains, “Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.,,, It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes. It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference.
We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm.”
And as the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Wallace himself, honestly admitted, “Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation.”
Darwinian materialists, with their reductive materialistic framework, are simply not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to explain what it truly means to be human in the first place.
Moreover, it is not as if Christians don’t have any empirical evidence that man possesses an immaterial component, (i.e. an immaterial mind, and even a immaterial ‘soul’), to his being.
In regards to free will, empirical evidence from neuroscience, and even from quantum mechanics itself, unambiguously reveals that humans do indeed have free will in a real and meaningful sense
Moreover, advances in quantum biology have now revealed that ‘quantum information’ is ubiquitous within the human body, i.e. in every important biomolecule of the human body, and that man, therefore, has a immaterial component to his being, a ‘soul’, that is irreducible to any possible reductive materialistic explanation, and that is, in principle, capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies.
Thus in conclusion, there are three fatal flaws in the Darwinian attempt to explain humans.
Evolutionary psychologists, in their denial of free will, (and the subsequent undermining of rationality itself), have undermined any claim that their worldview can possibly serve as the basis of science, philosophy, and even evolutionary psychology itself, in the first place
Moreover, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, and their implicit denial of the immaterial realm altogether, have also left everything that is truly important about what it really means to be human, and not animals, on the cutting room floor.
On top of all that, the materialistic claims of Darwinists that we have no free will, nor immaterial soul, are directly contradicted by the empirical evidence itself.
And as they say in baseball, “its three strikes and you’re out!”
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